Defending Their Own in the Cold: The Cultural Turns of U.S. Puerto Ricans

This volume explores U.S. Puerto Rican culture as presented in East Coast, Midwest, and Chicago cultural production while exploring Puerto Rican musical, film, artistic and literary performance. Marc Zimmerman relates the experience of Puerto Ricans to that of Chicanos and Cuban Americans, showing how Puerto Ricans have survived and created new identities and relations out of their colonized and diasporic circumstances. He looks at visual artists Juan Sanchez, Ramon Flores, and Elizam Escobar, New York Rican dancer turned poet Carmen Pursifull, and entertainment superstar Jennifer Lopez. Zimmerman offers his own semi-outsider perspective as a Jewish man from New York who married into a Puerto Rican family, and a final essay considers cultural attitudes towards Puerto Ricans in a testimonial text by author Miguel Barnet.